From the Desk of KauriHero — MASQ Proj Leader & Co-Founder
As we notice significant changes in sentiment and market conditions, its important for any business, project or community to step back and evaluate things!
Its been quite the journey so far since the inception of MASQ and I really thought it was time to address the community on a personal level, which I haven’t really done before, and share some thoughts, words and vision of the future.
Reading through this article, I’ll share some things about me and my experiences the past few years, what amazing potential exists for MASQ and notable achievements from our project.
To begin, I’d like to state that I am constantly amazed at what comes out of our group of like-minded and forward thinking people from around the world — the MASQ community project is one of a kind. Rising from the ashes of broken chapter of crypto time, to a strong core community of talented visionaries. Seeing the kind of value that people bring, sometimes unexpectedly, acts as a fuel for me personally to lead our project towards our higher purpose.
So one might read this and wonder, why do such talented people contribute like this to MASQ, and volunteer their time, effort and value?
Why do people believe MASQ Network is a special project that deserves attention?
I personally think two words sum it up succinctly:
PURPOSE and FREEDOM
The last 18 months have been nothing short of challenging AND amazing.
I was recently blessed in Feb 2021 with my first child to my wife (yes, you may laugh, as she is indeed a ‘lockdown baby’ but was planned haha). This has been a phenomenal experience of joy and love for our family. Thankfully, I have had a little dad-practice as I have raised my step-daughter for the last 8 years with my wife also, but one might say I cheated since I did not have to perform the ‘dirty jobs’ of diapers, puke, poop, milk, formula and all the other stuff that marks fatherhood!
Many of you who are parents will firmly agree, that children change you. When you look down at something strange and wonderful that you created, you feel a sense of pride, purpose and power that you can be part of something special and worldly — and this transcends you as an individual!
I truly feel a similar way towards MASQ and our team — and I didn’t realize it until I had our child this year. To me MASQ is a strangely technical, wonderful and modern solution, which has an extremely powerful purpose — and those who are part of it, in any form, ARE indeed part of something special, worldly and having a greater influence than we even can comprehend.
When I made the solemn promise to our co-founders that I wanted to lead this project to the best of my ability, I wasn’t actually worried about my WHY. To me that was extremely clear:
“We need to produce this solution for information freedom on the Internet, circumvent censorship and make this work trustlessly, so anyone and everyone can be part of it in a secure, private, decentralized and incentivized way!”
What I could only have started to understand on my personal journey with MASQ, was that myself and the team are not working on this solution for us— we are working on this solution for the people of the future — our children, grandchildren, those in censored and repressed countries and those who believe they are the most ‘free’!
Knowing the purpose is only part of whole vision.
The rest is Freedom
Running a remote team of various types of talent is not an easy feat — I have the challenges of time-zones, language, culture nuances — even some slang is not exactly channelled well across a screen of Telegram in conversation!
But without freedom to communication AND work on what I believe in, my work for MASQ would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to perform. I’m very lucky to enjoy many freedoms in life and the digital space in the country I live in. But others are not so fortunate.
Why is all this important? — if you look at the ‘freedoms’ that many of us enjoy today, some of them literally took generations to ingrain into society or in our work/business lives!
To achieve true freedoms in this world you have to have a certain level of grit. You have to have a certain level of commitment. And you have to have a patient and firm grasp on the purpose of what you are fighting for.
“So MASQ is supposed to be based on Internet Freedom right? Isn’t that what you guys are all working on?”
Well yes, in a nutshell it is — but what people reading need to understand, is that this whole entire ecosystem within MASQ Network is actually only a spark.
Its a spark that will ignite so many aspects of freedom around the world that people need right now and for the future.
Think… of the journalist trying to provide first-hand coverage of serious human rights issues in their country, at great personal risk to themselves because of their repressive governments? (check out this report from Aljazeera about China jailing journalists)
Consider… the high-school student who wants to know the ‘true’ story of history in their country, where they would be able to access free literature from around the world to conduct their research. (check out the so-called ‘freedom of information’ declaration by the UN here)
Let’s not forget… a person wanting to seek greater financial independence by accessing peer-to-peer networks to transact, transfer, invest and more in the digital space, and fearing that their financial institutions or data providers will restrict their ability to make choices (see recent article of UK bank banning 5 million customers from digital asset purchases)
All these examples are just tiny sparks within the FREEDOM space that MASQ Network will create for the world.
These sparks will start a movement of change and innovation across a true decentralized Internet access for anyone in the world — and this mesh network can be built on to provide other tools for users that we haven’t even thought up yet
What's in Store for the Near Future?
It’s been a bit quiet on the technical news from me and the team recently, and this is mainly due to some further strategic planning and groundwork that took place for GEMINI, tech debt and coding work, some internal testing on the NEO software, and also some exciting meetings that have been progressed with some other projects. All these things have happened in a flurry, so I’ve been behind on pushing some of this information out.
I think some of these things really do deserve articles on their own to truly do them justice, so I’ll be posting those as well.
In meantime, below are some great things achieved in the past 45 days.
Recent achievements for the MASQ team & community:
- Installers successfully deployed for NEO v0.1 users in Windows, Linux and MacOS
- Electron based app NEO v0.1 released for private testers
- Successful testing on larger scale with NEO — showing consuming and serving for many users live with on-chain earning and spending of test-tokens on Ropsten
- Onboarded new GUI developer to assist in building GEMINI v0.2 software
- Completed another iteration of the UX onboarding for new users to start using the software (GEMINI v0.2 will be based on this)
- UX Testing Plan ready for GEMINI
- Sushiswap Liquidity Pool (LP) deployed, with >$500,000 in the MASQ-ETH pair
- LOGO Sting competition completed, showing amazing talent from the community— over 70,000 $MASQ awarded to winners and participants
- MASQ Network Featured in Rust-in-Blockchain community newsletter
- Finalized Q3 marketing outreach strategy
